Press Releases:

We Will Organize Against this White Supremacist President’s Agenda September 5, 2017 In response to the announcement that the White House is terminating the deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) program, Marisa Franco, director of Mijente, issued the following statement: “Jeff Sessions is a living monument to the Confederacy. He and Donald Trump’s white [...]

Undocumented and immigrant leaders were joined by community organizations and labor unions on Monday to demand Members of Congress to defend DACA and TPS, to investigate ICE’s rogue actions and to hold the line on all hate legislation that further criminalize immigrants.

“At a time when the administration is trying to defund health care, PBS, or almost all other government agencies over their supposed costs, it’s ridiculous to see it also trying to inflate ICE’s payroll.”

Press:

Two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes over the White House and carries out his campaign promises, a coalition of “bibles, badges and business” has launched a campaign “to educate” the incoming administration on immigration reform in hopes that criminal immigrants will be targeted and not those who are contributing to this country.“We do not support the criminal alien. I don’t care who that criminal person is. If they’re bad, they need to go,” said Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League at a Nov. 22 press conference to launch California Leadership for a New American Economy Organization.

Marisa Franco, who helped organize demonstrations against Trump’s campaign, expects that much of the participation in protests around January 20th will be motivated by questions of immigration and deportation. “Inauguration Day marks the beginning of the nightmare for millions of people across the country,” she said. “For many of us, we simply cannot afford to hold onto a hollow hope that Trump will change course on the disasters he pledged in his campaign. We understand that we have to use everything in our power to resist and force a detour from taking us all backwards.”

For Latino-rights activist Marisa Franco, election night was bittersweet.For years, she had focused her advocacy work on Arizona, a state that in 2010 approved a law allowing police to ask anyone during a traffic stop for their immigration papers. The public face of that controversial measure, which was widely criticized for leading to the targeting of Latinos by police, was Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The Democratic Party will hit a new nadir in state legislative seats after suffering more losses in November’s elections, highlighting the devastation up and down the party across the nation.Republicans will control 4,170 state legislative seats after last week’s elections, while Democrats will control 3,129 seats in the nation’s 98 partisan legislative chambers. Republicans picked up a net gain of 46 seats in Tuesday’s elections, while Democrats lost 46 seats, according to the latest vote counts from The Associated Press.

For veteran community organizers, election seasons are always chaotic and fraught with contradictions. This year is no exception for me. I am a queer, Chicana woman from Arizona who after many years organizing in other states has moved back to Phoenix. Most recently I helped found Mijente, a digital and grassroots hub for Latinx and Chicanx organizing and movement building. As we watched the rise of Trump, we knew he had to be stopped. But we also knew that for many communities of color, Trump’s America is already here. Like many, I’ve engaged in this election to defend against racism, sexism and xenophobia and to do this in a way that mobilizes social movements and raises expectations for what we expect from the next President – because whoever emerges as the victor, we have our work cut out for us.

Six months ago, Remezcla made the decision to stop covering Donald Trump – the most openly bigoted, ignorant and dangerous presidential candidate we’ve seen in our lifetimes – and instead use our platform to highlight the resistance, activism and mobilization of those working to oppose him. From the California high school students who won the right to wear “Dump Trump” T-shirts to school; to the workers at the Las Vegas Trump International Hotel fighting to unionize; to the taco trucks that began registering citizens to vote in Texas and Arizona, Latinos have been organizing in record numbers to defeat a man who has threatened, insulted and belittled our community.

Last Month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it will phase out the use of privately operated prisons, citing data that shows for-profit institutions are not as safe or effective as those run directly by the government.Today (September 28), a coalition of 350 legal rights and progressive organizations—including Color Of Change, Presente, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Mijente and the American Civil Liberties Union—delivered a petition demanding that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) follow suit and dump its contracts with private corporations.

“The browns versus the grays,” she calls it—the ascendant young Latino power versus the fearful old white people, many retirees from elsewhere. “They came here from other states where they’re not used to seeing Mexicans, and then they think they should be in charge, even though we were here first,” she says.

On September 11th, 2001, I had a flight to Washington D.C. to testify in support of the DREAM Act, which would have given undocumented students like me a way to become U.S. citizens. My flight was canceled, the Congressional hearing was indefinitely postponed, and all immigration discussions shifted to immigrants as potential terrorist threats, particularly if they were Muslim, Arab or South Asian. Fifteen years later, the rhetoric of immigrants as threats to national security is still used as a justification for the record-breaking deportations, incarceration and criminalization, and violations of immigrants' due process and civil rights. We need to work towards dismantling the systems that were created in the name of preserving national security, starting with the two agencies born 15 years ago after 9/11: the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

There are ways to enforce the law without mistreating a population that fits no definition of a criminal threat. The job of dismantling the prison network Mr. Obama built will pass on to Hillary Clinton, if she is elected. If it’s Donald Trump, who wants to make immigration enforcement the federal government’s overriding priority, then private incarceration, industry profits and human suffering will go through the roof.

“Private companies today will be looking for new customers and the Obama administration needs to make sure that no other government agency will be their clients,” said Jacinta Gonzalez of the #Not1More campaign in a statement sent to Fusion.“Until private incarceration and detention is ended all together, these facilities will just be recycled between agencies,” said Gonzalez.

Mr. Arpaio, who is 84, is on the ballot this November, seeking reelection to a seventh term. He has cost the taxpayers of Maricopa County more than $40 million in legal fees in the current case, to say nothing of tens of millions more in litigation and settlements arising from lawsuits alleging an array of other misconduct by his office. The sheriff is a disgrace. If he’s not turned out of office by voters, a jury of his peers may deal with the problem, at last.

“It’s past time that DHS end the practice of detaining immigrants, and this review should move it in that direction,” Jacinta Gonález, a field director with the grassroots Latinx group Mijente, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. “Its review of privately-run facilities should start at the Eloy detention center [in Arizona] where there are open cases of sexual assault, a history of suspicious deaths, and 200 detainees recently staged a hunger strike to protest treatment in the facility.”

Federal immigration officials are considering phasing out the use of private contractors at its detention facilities amid pressure from immigrant advocates to end the practice.U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Monday that he’s asked an advisory council to review whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which falls under the DHS umbrella, should keep immigration detention facilities under private operators. He said the decision came after the Department of Justice announced on Aug. 18 that it was phasing out the use of some private prisons, citing an audit that found that private facilities have more safety and security problems than government-run ones.